The world waits for Google’s Chrome OS

Google will hold a conference call today outlining its plans for the operating system.

It has invited journalists to a webcast that starts at 10:00AM and goes on to 11:00PM Pacific. We suspect that’s a typo because any press conference that goes on for over an hour is way too long for your average hack.

We’ll all have to wait to 10AM to find out what Google holds in store for an operating system that is presumably intended to challenge the dominance of Microsoft and Apple.

It’s not an easy thing to build an operating system but these days it’s very much harder to make it work in the marketplace. Linux, of course, has had some success but the number of operating systems that have dropped off the mortal coil is legion. Well, there’s a lot of them, anyway – from BeOS to OS/2.

Even if Google is ready to throw a beta of the operating system into a waiting world today, it will have something of a struggle to push it on computing platforms. The Mac and Linux OSes have a relatively small market share compared to Microsoft Windows, and you could even argue that Chrome is just a variant of Linux.